User research requires users. And we know that the recruitment process—finding, vetting, scheduling, connecting, and paying—can be anything but easy. Thankfully, an entire category of software platforms exist (including us) to help teams with this research step.
But how do you know if a participant recruitment platform is right for your team?
This guide will help you get to that answer. It provides a breakdown of features and functionality to evaluate, and questions to help you choose. With the right participant recruitment solution in your tool stack, your team can spend less time searching for customers and more time discovering insights from them.
What is a participant recruitment platform?
Most industry research—market research, product research, user research—requires talking to actual customers (and prospective customers) and capturing feedback. That feedback, in turn, helps you to make better decisions, whether about feature developments, product improvements, or new opportunities.
Participant recruitment platforms are explicitly focused on this aspect of the insights-gathering process. They manage or maintain some type of audience that customers—either via self-service DIY or assisted—can access to source customer feedback and insights.
The best participant recruitment platforms anticipate recruitment needs that go beyond just “finding” your customers and include features to screen, schedule, connect, incentivize and track.
Why use a participant recruitment platform?
Finding people to talk to and learn from might not seem such a hard thing. When user experience professionals are surveyed, however, they report a flurry of pain points. These include quantity, quality, speed, and consistency (among others). Another report showed that recruitment operations (aspects including scheduling and incentivizing) are the single biggest factor (over 36%) in delaying research projects.
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A good participant recruitment tool, which this guide will help you select, solves for many of these pain points so that your team will spend less time on the operations of customer feedback and more time connecting with and learning from users. And when decisions are informed by actual customer insights, products tend to require less re-work and resonate with users faster.
🙋 Read why people like participating on User Interviews.
In short, your teammates (or employees) who require customer feedback to make better decisions will thank you the next time a mission critical question or problem arises.
Features to evaluate in a participant recruitment platform
It can be overwhelming to know what features are critical to the participant recruitment process and what’s marketing hype. In general, any platform worth your investment will have robust functionality in the following categories:
- Panel composition and reach
- Screening, scheduling, and messaging
- Testing methods and integrations
- Incentives management
- Security and compliance
- Panel building and management
Each of these categories is important when building a predictable, high quality, and repeatable insights practice. Here is what you should be looking for within each of them.
Panel composition and reach
One of the most important features for any participant recruitment platform is the composition and quality of their audience (sometimes called their panel). Good decisions come from good research, which all starts from good (trustworthy, reliable, relevant) users.
Use the following questions to assess a platform’s audience or panel.
What type of panel do they offer?
In general, there are two types of participant panels: proprietary and non-proprietary. Proprietary means the platform directly oversees its composition and health, and can take actions to increase, diversify, and intervene as needed. Non-proprietary panels are often culled together from other providers, reducing the visibility into who is really in it.
Who populates the panel audience?
The composition of a platform’s panel is core to its value for your research needs. Most platforms in this space will have robust audience stats on-hand to give an overview. Don’t rely on those alone, however. Ask questions like:
- Do you offer consumer as well as business or professional audiences?
- What countries are represented?
- What is the demographic and sociographic mix of the panel?
If you have specific participant requirements, make sure to lead with those. And if you don’t need to find people to talk to, but actually want a way to manage an audience you already are in contact with, then skip ahead to the “Panel CRM” section, which covers that use case.
What steps are taken to prevent and mitigate fraud?
Fraudulent responses undermine the confidence in your results and decisions based on research. Understanding how a platform addresses and mitigates fraud is critical. Ask things like:
- Does the platform outline how it detects and prevents fraudulent responses?
- Are those checks conducted in all or partly by humans (vs. automated scanning)?
- What are the reporting options available in the event of suspected fraud?
- What information is available about participants to enable cross-checking and verification of profile details?
Learn more about User Interviews’ panel participants.
Screening, scheduling, and messaging
Research workflow operations—the process of identifying, screening, scheduling, and coordinating sessions with participants—is a foundational featureset of any recruitment platform. Automations, integrations, customizations, and controls all help you spend less time managing participant recruitment and more time learning from customers.
Ask these questions to make sure your choice stacks up.
What can I learn about participants pre-session?
Budgets, resources, and the market all value speed, so you don't want to spend time second guessing whether or not a participant is the right fit for your research. Features like customizable screener surveys, onboard profile data, and targeting characteristics are all valuable. Together, they help you home in on the best possible participants for your needs and confirm they are who they claim to be.
How are research activities scheduled?
The remote and hybrid work moment showed just how important features like calendar syncing, integrations, and meeting roles are. Coordinating research sessions is no different. Ask things like:
- Can you connect your (and your team’s) calendar to identify availability?
- Does it account for multiple time zones or breaks between sessions?
- Can sessions be automatically scheduled?
- What role settings (e.g., moderator, note taker) are available for sessions?
Can I communicate with participants?
During any research study, it's important that you're able to quickly and effectively communicate with your participants should any changes or important information need to be conveyed. Evaluate things like:
- What options are there to send messages to your users before and after sessions?
- Where do these messages populate for participants?
- How customizable (e.g., branding) are they?
- Can messages be sent in bulk or even automatically?
16 ways to reduce no-shows in UX research.
Testing methods and integrations
The ability to source and schedule time with customers is only part of the process. It is critical that a recruitment platform remain flexible in the methods it supports. Now you need to do something with them. This might be an interview, a survey, or a usability test. That way, more teams within your organization can connect with and learn from customers in the manner that works for them.
Investigate the following when evaluating a platform’s testing capabilities.
Are there direct testing tool integrations?
The benefit of direct integrations with research tools is a smoother experience for both your team and—especially—your participants. Integrations also inject features you rely on for research into the participant recruitment process: things like survey completion progress, automated tracking, and easier ways to invite colleagues.
How do participants access research activities?
Many participant management platforms utilize URL links to send users their various research activities. Where they access links is key (e.g., via email or a participant portal). You don’t want any unneeded friction between a customer raising their hand to participate and their accessing the research or interview link.
Does the platform offer an API or data integrations?
An API offers your team more flexibility to customize the data about participants you see when recruiting. Maybe your team wants subscription information (from a CRM) or needs to remove some information to stay compliant with security protocols. All of this is possible with an API.
What is the roadmap for integrations?
Will the testing integrations of today be the same when it’s time to renew your subscription? Look for the ability to request integrations, or at least signs that support for a new platform is in the works. It is reasonable—even ideal—that colleagues and stakeholders talking to and learning from customers will have emergent research needs. Ensure that your platform will grow with you.
Learn about UX research methodologies to meet your insight needs.
Incentives management
Compensating participants and customers for their time, feedback, and experience is a cornerstone of any ethical research practice. It ensures that a relationship is built, instead of mere “insight extraction.” As such, any research recruitment platform under consideration today should have a robust featureset to facilitate incentives to your participants.
Automation in particular should be core to any incentives capability. Automation ensures timely compensation and a positive participant experience, fostering trust and encouraging ongoing engagement, while allowing researchers to focus on gathering insights without getting bogged down in administrative tasks.
Here are a few other aspects of incentives management to look for.
What currencies are supported?
The kind of currencies offered might limit your research footprint or reach, so be sure to check with your team on specific requirements. Other questions worth asking include:
- Can you incentivize participants in their country’s home currency?
- Are conversions from one currency to another built-in or manually managed by your team?
What types of incentives are supported?
Although most research participants can accept direct cash incentives, others—such as current customers or some types of industries—have regulations against accepting them. In these cases, you’ll want to ask about alternative incentive options such as charitable in-kind donations or even gift cards, which are often acceptable instead.
What does incentive tracking and documentation look like?
Tracking and documenting for your team’s incentive payments is crucial – both for full visibility into your participants’ compensation and for managing tax information when applicable, including necessary forms and notifications. The last thing you want after onboarding a recruitment platform is informing your finance or legal department of additional work. The best platforms manage this for you and your team.
Other considerations related to incentives management include:
- Can you change or adjust incentives mid-project?
- Can you award bonuses to boost engagement?
- What messaging is sent to participants and is it customizable?
- Can limits or restrictions be placed on who may distribute incentives?
Our free incentive calculator will help you set fair compensation.
Security and compliance
Any enterprise software solution, but especially one that involves your customers’ own data, should have a set of robust, thorough, and clearly outlined privacy and security policies. Regulatory action has produced certifications you can use to determine the “hardness” of a platform’s security.
Be sure to meet with your own data, legal, and/or engineering teams to confirm any minimum standards that need to be met by a provider. You may—as a result of your industry or customer type—require additional data and security management.
In general, however, here are some questions to ask when evaluating a platform’s security.
What certifications have they earned?
It's common to see companies display badges and awards that showcase their accolades and affiliations, but it's crucial to distinguish these from genuine infosecurity certifications, which in stark contrast, require rigorous testing by a third-party over a set course of time. Additionally, these tests are re-run on a set schedule to ensure the platform is maintaining its standards.
These certifications might include:
- GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
- ISO 27001 and 27701 (standards for information security and privacy)
- HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
- SOC 2 Type II (System and Organization Controls)
What are its data retention and deletion policies?
Ownership of data, including access and editing controls to things like participant profiles, screener responses, and consent forms, should be clearly defined. For example:
- Where is customers’ information stored (i.e., physical location) and for how long?
- What control do you have over its deletion?
- Who from the vendor’s side can access and view this information?
- Are these policies available for review on the platform’s website?
What vendors does the platform use for its own data management?
Most recruitment management platforms use other vendors to store, maintain, and move customer data. Be sure to dig into things like:
- Who are those data vendors?
- Are they recognized within the security industry?
- What are their encryption policies and capabilities?
Your engineering or data teams may also have minimum time requirements for support—these should be clearly spelled out in a platform’s documentation or policies.
How does the platform experience support data security?
Check for industry-standard privacy and security features such as two-factor authentication (2FA), Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities, and customer data masking.
Read how User Interviews prioritizes privacy and security in its platform.
Panel building and management
Recruiting for research from a platform’s own panel audience is not the only way to find customers for insights. It's also crucial to be able to talk to your current customers to discover and implement real user feedback. This capability is known as a research CRM.
The benefits of building one’s own panel are many: they make it easier for stakeholders to connect with customers, enable standardization of research operations, and offer the opportunity to continuously learn from a curated group of people important to a business.
Not all participant recruitment platforms offer both external recruitment from an audience and the ability to build one’s own panel. If your research and insights needs require connecting with your own customers (or from a list of members), then this panel building functionality should be on the top of your list.
Here are some questions to ask when evaluating a panel or CRM platform.
How can I add customers to my panel?
The first step in building a panel is recruiting customers to populate it. What methods are offered by the platform? Common ways include bulk list uploads via CSV files, customizable opt-in forms, and in-platform emails.
What data enrichment options are available?
With enrichment, you have more glanceable, filterable information about your panelists. Questions to help you include:
- What information do you need on-hand to make your research panel useful, actionable, and relevant?
- Can you create custom groups, filters, and organize customers via tags?
- Can you add custom profile information via integrations or an API?
- What controls exist for masking personally-identifiable information (PII) from teammates using the panel?
What is the process for recruiting my own customers?
Most of the feature categories explored above should apply to your own panel. For example:
- Can you create and launch customizable screeners?
- Is there an on-board scheduling feature?
- Am I able to manage and distribute incentives?
In addition to these, healthy participant panels often require additional features, including:
- Invite rules to standardize outreach
- Invite limits to reduce fatigue or burnout
- Customizable branding on messages and forms
- Data consent document management and customization
What account management controls exist?
Managing an in-house research or participant panel can be a full-time job. That job is made much easier with administrative settings and customizations, including:
- User role controls (e.g., viewer vs. editor status)
- Activity reports showing incentive spend and outreach frequency
- Panel-wide metrics on engagement, customizable by profile or persona
Learn more about the benefits of building a research panel.
Other important platform considerations
There are a few elements to consider beyond feature sets that can inform whether or not a platform is the right fit for your insights needs. These include:
- Support: What kinds of support are offered? Is it only automated (e.g., a chatbot) or does it involve a human? Is a subscription required for certain kinds of support? Does support include project guidance or only platform help? Is it available on weekends or weekdays only? Is a support person dedicated to your account?
- Pricing: Is it transparent (i.e., can you find it on their website)? How is it determined (e.g., seat/access based, complete based)? Is project-based pricing available? How flexible are their subscription lengths?
- Participant experience: Is there a team dedicated to answering participant questions? How do panel participants rate their experience of the platform (on sites like TrustPilot)?
- Company: Is the platform part of a larger conglomerate (that supports other, non-recruitment functionality) or focused exclusively on participant recruitment and management?
🛒 Get this buyer's guide in a free template here.
More resources on research participant recruitment
- New to research? Check out our on-demand research 101 course.
- Our Field Guide offers a step-by-step look at the recruitment process.
- Building a research tool stack? Our UX Tools Map is the definitive list.
- Not sure how many participants to recruit? Use our free sample calculator.
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